VirtualBox: Networking between Linux Host and Windows XP Guest

In this article we will learn how to configure networking between Linux host OS and Windows Guest (VM) using Virtualbox

1. First of all download and install Virtualbox on your Linux host and install the guest operating system

2. Now configure network on Guest OS, open VM settings and click Network

3. Select Host-Only Adapter from "Attached to" combo



The VM will create the default network interface named by "vboxnet0" on the host OS,

#ifconfig
vboxnet0  Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 0A:00:27:00:00:00 
          inet addr:192.168.56.1  Bcast:192.168.56.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:3599 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:3896747 (3.7 MiB)

VirtualBox automatically assigned IP address 192.168.56.1 on the host to that network interface.

4. Launch the XP guest OS from virtualbox and configured the network upon VM successfully boot

 5. Make sure both Host and guest can responding to each other 'ping'
ping 192.168.56.10
PING 192.168.56.10 (192.168.56.10) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.56.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=1.83 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.56.10: icmp_seq=2 ttl=128 time=0.512 ms

Enabling Internet for VM.

Above steps was fine as far as networking between Host and VM is concerned, however if you want to let VM also access the Internet then you have to configure the following iptables rules and enable ipfowarding on Host OS.

# insert NAT rule
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o vboxnet0 -j MASQUERADE
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

# enable forwarding
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward